Internationalized Domain Names

In recent months Internationalized Domain Names -- url's and email addresses written in scripts other than Latin -- have been set up for testing by ICANN. You can see whether your browser is equipped to handle the IDNA protocol which these use by clicking on links at the bottom of this page. You can similarly test your email client here.

Note the difference in what appears in the browser address bar when you point Safari at the topmost (Arabic) site and the (9th down) Russian site. The former will be in the native script, while the latter will be in an ASCII translation called Punycode. This is done because Russian script and Roman script can be confusable and create security problems. Which scripts generate Punycode is determined by a "whitelist" in the Safari app. Info on this and other aspects of Safari support for IDNA can be found here.

IDNA is currently limited to the range of scripts included in Unicode 3.2 in 2002. Since then nearly 30 more have been added, and the IETF is working on an update that will accommodate Unicode 5.1 and any future version

New Welsh Language Tools Available

Those who need to work in Welsh may be interested in Cysgliad, which has a spell and grammar checker plus dictionaries for this language. Look toward the bottom of the page for the OS X version.

Unicode 5.1

The Unicode Standard is expected to be officially updated to version 5.1 around the end of March, and a draft summary of the changes is available. 1624 new characters will be added, bringing to total number defined to 100,507. New scripts are Kayah Li, Cham, Lepcha, Ol Chiki, Rejang, Saurashtra, Sundanese, Vai, Carian, Lycian, Lydian, plus the Phaistos disc, dominoes, and Mahjong symbols.

Unicode 5.1 will also enable the use of ideographic variation sequences. These allow standardized representation of variant glyphs in Japanese, Chinese, and Korean, according to the Uncode IV Database for such sequences.

OS X 10.5 Leopard: Fix For Vietnamese VIQR IM

A reader of this blog has pointed out that the VIQR option in Leopard's new Vietnamese IM seems to be completely broken. For a possible replacement, download the layout found here.

OS X 10.5 Leopard: Fixing the Macedonian Keyboard

Although Leopard corrected some errors in Tiger's Macedonian keyboard layout, the current version still seems to be missing two characters which should be used in certain circumstances, namely ѐЀ and ѝЍ. If you have an ISO/European keyboard, the fix is to download a replacement layout here. If you have an ANSI/US keyboard, you should download Macedonianz.keylayout from my iDisk..

If using Macedonianz, you make the extra characters by typing Option + `, followed by the base letter.

10.5.2 Update Fixes Russian-PC, Latvian, and Chinese Keyboards?

According to its release notes, the 10.5.2 update for OS X fixes the problems mentioned in this blog with the Russian PC and Latvian keyboard layouts that came with 10.5.0. But I still don't see any ё in the Russian-PC ANSI layout on my machine. Apparently it is only present on an ISO/European keyboard. On the other hand, although not mentioned, it looks like they may have fixed the bug in HaninYiTian.

Getting Your Mac to Speak Other Languages

For an excellent up-to-date reference on other voices for OS X's Text-To-Speech features, see this page at Ricky Buchanan's ATMac site.

If Your Chinese Characters Don't Look Quite Right....

A poster in the Apple Forums recently asked why certain Simplified Chinese characters did not look exactly the way he expected them to, giving as examples bao1 (U+5305) and fang2 (U+623F). Looking these up in the Character Palette, I discovered that they are characters where the Chinese and Japanese versions are visibly different. You can compare them here. The first column is Japanese, while the second two columns are Chinese.

So it appears that the poster's apps were using OS X's Japanese fonts instead of the Chinese ones that he wanted. Aside from switching to the correct font, one possible solution for this is to go to System Preferences/International/Languages and make sure that Simplified Chinese (简体中文) is higher on the list than Japanese (日本語).

This issue arises as a result of the unification of the Han Script in Unicode, under which slightly different versions of characters were given the same code point. Fonts produced for specific languages will nonetheless retain the different versions. For more info you can check here.

App for Advanced Korean Word Processing

If you work in Korean and need features beyond what normal Apple and Windows apps can provide, like additional fonts, vertical layout, spell checking, and support for ancient Hangul characters, I understand that the product to get is Hangul 2006 For Mac. A source for it is here. For more info on the app see this article.

Reading Non-Unicode Tibetan

Although OS X, starting with 10.5, includes support for Unicode Tibetan, it turns out that a number of important Tibetan language sites have not yet reached this point and still use custom fonts with legacy encodings. Examples are Radio Free Asia, SaveTibet.org and Tibet.net. To view these sites you will need to download and install the special font they use, TCRC YoutsoWeb. You might also need to try a different browser, like FireFox or Opera, rather than Safari, and fiddle with its font preferences.

You can download tcrcyweb.ttf here or from my iDisk.

As for official Chinese sites, these seem to be only in Chinese or to use graphics instead of text. An example of the latter is China Tibet News An example of a Chinese site in Unicode Tibetan is Tibet Information Technology Web.

Work-Around for Mail's NBSP Bug

A poster in the Apple forums has pointed out that Mail.app appears to have a strange bug: There is no way to input U+00A0/NBSP "No-Break Space". When you try to do this, either via the keyboard (Alt/Opt + space) or the Character Palette or via copy/paste, only an ordinary Space (U+0020) is produced in the text.

This is a problem because French text, for example, should ideally have an NBSP before certain punctuation, especially ! and ?. Using ordinary spaces means that these marks can get separated from the text they belong to at line endings, which is very ugly.

A possible work-around is use U+202F "Narrow No-Break Space" instead, which Mail.app does accept for input. Unfortunately I don't think any standard keyboard layouts have this character, so you have create a custom layout or input it from the Character Palette or via similar means. Also it could cause problems if the other end is using software that doesn't understand Unicode or fonts that don't handle 202F correctly.

The best tool for making a custom layout is Ukelele.

Mac Office 2008: Still No Arabic/Hebrew Support

MS Office for Mac 2008 was released Jan. 15, and info on its language capabilities is now available here. Notable is a) the continuing lack of ability to work with Arabic/Hebrew, and b) the presence of Tamil on the list of supported languages. First reports I have indicate that Word 2008 cannot in fact do Tamil (the font is not recognized and you just see squares). One source says the other parts of Office do display it. There are also reports that both PowerPoint and Entourage can do Arabic/Hebrew.

iPhone Language Input Capabilities Still Not Expanded

I was surprised to hear that the 1.1.3 iPhone update announced at MacWorld January 15 apparently did not add Japanese or other new keyboard input capabilities to match what has been available since introduction in the iPod Touch. This seems especially odd since the iPhone User Guide (p. 21) has said for months now that these were already present.

Typing Kharosthi

Kharosthi was used to write Sanskrit and Gandhari about 2000 years ago, and is the script of the oldest Buddhist manuscripts yet found. It plays a role in Eliot Pattison's mystery "Water Touching Stone," which I am currently reading. An example of the kind of wooden tablet mentioned in that book can be seen here.

Two fonts which include Kharosthi are Alphabetum Unicode and MPH 2B Damase. A rudimentary keyboard layout can be downloaded from my iDisk.

The available fonts and OS X are not yet capable of displaying Kharosthi properly.

OS X 10.5 Leopard: Chinese Module for Dictionary.app

An ingenious programmer has used Apple's Dictionary Development Kit to produce a Chinese module for Dictionary.app based on CEDICT. You can download it here. The unzipped file goes in Library/Dictionaries.

OS X 10.5 Leopard: Fixing Anjal Tamil Input

In the Apple Forums a user pointed out that Leopard's version of the Anjal Tamil Input Method has at least two bugs: the output of the combination "tr" is wrong and the em-dash is not available. Luckily Leopard's Anjal system contains two text files which users can modify to fix such things or make other customizations -- Anjal.keylayout and AnjalTransliterator.txt. You will find them in System/Library/Input Methods/TamilIM/Contents/Resources (you need to do Control + click > show package contents on the TamilIM item to get to Contents).

On my iDisk you can find a folder called "New Anjal" which has modified copies of these files to fix the two bugs mentioned. Or if I haven't got it quite right, it should not be hard to do so yourself.

OS X 10.5 Leopard: Fixing the Russian PC Keyboard

Somehow Apple forgot to include the character ё (U+0451) in the Russian PC keyboard layout, at least as far as the ANSI physical keyboards are concerned (whether it shows up on the extra key on an ISO keyboard I don't know). If you need a replacement, you can download the RussianPC or RussianPC2 layouts from my iDisk.

The Russian and Russian Phonetic layouts do not have this problem.

OS X 10.5 Leopard: Fix for Missing Keyboard Viewer and Character Palette

Some users of Leopard have reported not having any Keyboard Viewer or Character Palette entry in System Preferences/International/Input Menu, so they cannot activate and use these functions. A possible fix has been posted in the Apple Forums here.

OS X 10.5 Leopard: Fixing Thai

In Leopard Apple decided to switch the default Thai font from Lucida Grande to Thonburi, making the Thai characters in the former inaccessible. This causes problems because a) the Thonburi Bold font is non-functioning for some reason and b) Thonburi's spacing is botched for mixed Thai/Latin text.

Pending Apple's fixing these issues, one idea is to replace Thonburi in System/Library/Fonts with a different Thai font. I downloaded the Garuda set described at this site and used FontForge to rename them Thonburi. After making backup copies of Apple's Thonburi, I replaced it with the renamed Garuda, and this seems to work. A copy of the renamed set can be gotten from my iDisk (the folder Garudathonburi). Feedback on whether this solution is helpful would be welcome.

Another fix would be to replace the Lucida Grande in Leopard with the same font from Tiger. I have seen reports that this does not seem to cause any problems.

Firefox 3 Fixes Language Problems

I've always kept FireFox on my Mac as an alternative to Safari, but its value has been limited because of FireFox's inability to recognize certain Apple fonts that are required for the correct display of Devanagari and similar scripts. This has now been fixed in FireFox 3, a beta version of which has just become available. Using this test page, you should see that Hindi, Tamil, and Tibetan all look right (Tibetan requires 10.5). Bugs in some earlier versions related to Thai and Cyrillic also seem fixed.

OS X 10.5 Leopard: Fix for Missing Input Menu Setting

For some reason, Leopard no longer has the setting previously found in OS X in System Preferences/International/Input Menu for "Allow a different input source for each document." This is badly missed by many who need to have different keyboards active in different apps and don't want to constantly have to switch the layout. A possible fix is the app InputSwitcher. Instructions are in the ReadMe contained in the download.

Translation/Localization Tools Update

Earlier this year I did a short article on tools for translation and localization using a Mac. Recently I've become aware of a blog by Jean-Christophe Helary which I highly recommend to anyone involved in this field:

Mac For Translators

Fix for Leopard Chinese Input Bug

10.5's Traditional Chinese Input Method for Hanin/YiTian has a faulty keyboard mapping which results in incorrect output and missing characters. A possible fix for this is described here.

OS X 10.5 Leopard: New Vietnamese IM Includes Han Nom

Leopard adds a new set of Vietnamese keyboards which implement the most common ASCII systems for inputting this language -- Telex, VNI, and VIQR.

More interesting is that when one of these is selected you get a new item in the "flag" menu, "Convert to Hán-Nôm," which lets you convert selected modern Vietnamese Latin script into the Nom or Chinese characters used in ancient Vietnamese.

iPhone Language Capabilities Expanded

Firmware update 1.1.2 of Nov. 9, 2007 reportedly adds French, German, and Italian user interfaces plus UK, French, German, and Italian keyboards/predictive typing. There is an "Asian Fonts" setting for Chinese or Japanese, the purpose of which is unclear, since it apparently does not enable input for those languages. The latest iPhone User Guide on Apple's site (p. 19) indicates this device has the same language capabilities as the iPod Touch, but that is not yet accurate as far as I can tell.

New Cuneiform Font Available

A new font, CuneiformComposite.ttf, which corresponds to the full Sumero-Akkadian section of Unicode 5.0, can now be downloaded from this page. For more general info on this script, see my earlier article.

With the new custom input method generator included in Leopard, it should be fairly easy to build a way to input Cuneiform directly from the keyboard on the basis of sign names or a word dictionary.

OS X 10.5 Leopard: New Custom Input Method Generator

While previous versions of OS X included a way to make custom input methods, it was only good for Chinese and had other limitations. Leopard comes with a generic system for creating input methods that should work with any Unicode font, and thus open new options for typing scripts that don't lend themselves to the usual alphabetic keyboard layout. Essentially all you have to do is produce a tabbed file equating ascii strings to the output you wish to appear, put it into the proper format, and install it in Home/Library/Input Methods. Details can be found here.

Note that the Apple article example is only for the .inputplugin format. For the .cin format, see this page.

OX 10.5 Leopard: New Dictionary Development Kit

One of Leopard's new language features is the addition of a cool Japanese dictionary alongside the English one in Dictionary.app. But I see that in the XCode stuff, in Developer/Extras, there is also now a Dictionary Development Kit. Assuming it is not too hard to use, this could open the door to the creation by ordinary users of all kinds of additional dictionaries in other languages.

Leopard Can Use Windows Arabic Fonts

Playing around with TextEdit, I've discovered that the new Leopard can apparently display Windows Arabic fonts correctly. Previously trying to select such fonts would result in disconnected and wrongly-shaped glyphs, so that only Apple's Geeza Pro or other AAT fonts could be used. This was especially a problem in Safari when the user had installed MS Office, which included Arial and Times New Roman fonts with Arabic in them that often got selected by web pages. Persumably this new feature represents expanded OS X support for OpenType font features. My tests indicate that Windows Devanagari and other Indic script fonts are still not supported however. Also Windows Arabic fonts do not work in Pages.

Main FAQ Page Switched to Leopard

The main Multilingual Mac FAQ Page has now been redone for OS X 10.5 Leopard. As I am still learning all the features of the new system, some parts may not be totally accurate, and they will be updated as soon as possible.

The Tiger page is still available here. It will not be updated further, but may be useful for people running that OS and for OS 9. Because Leopard no longer supports OS 9, the main FAQ page will no longer cover it.

OS X 10.5 Leopard: Languages Preference Pane Expanded

The presence and order of the names in OS X's System Preferences > International > Languages pane determines things like system and application localization, font priority, list sorting, and the Mail encoding menu. Normally by default it contains the available system localizations (18 in Leopard), but you can easily add to this by using the Edit button.

The total number of languages you can select depends to some extent on whether you have installed any extra fonts, but even with those provided by Apple it is remarkable, well over 100. I had 110 on Tiger and in Leopard this has increased to 138. A few of the more unusual entries are Klingon, Latin, Navajo, and Sanskrit. If you have a look for yourself, you will see that the languages appear in their own script, but mousing over a name gives you the English translation. You can see a full list here.

OS X 10.5 Leopard: Asian Script IM Help Finally in English

One very nice new feature of Leopard is that the Help for the Japanese, Korean, and Traditional and Simplified Chinese Input Methods is finally available in English. Previously the only English resources available from Apple regarding these complex systems were old manuals for OS 9. I don't think there is any way to print out all the Help at once, but you can find the files at System > Library > Input Methods ( do Control + Click > Show Package Contents on the IM you want) Contents > Resources > English.lproj.

Unfortunately there is no Help of any sort provided by Apple for the Tamil and Tibetan keyboards, which would also be useful for those not already familiar with the standard ways to input these scripts.

OS X 10.5 Leopard: New Fonts and Scripts

Tibetan: This is the primary new script included with Leopard, covered by the fonts KaiLasa and Kokonor, with 3 input methods provided.

Georgian: Included in the newly-added (but actually old) Windows Arial Unicode font. (This also contains Bengali, Oriya, Telugu, Kannada, Malayam, and Lao, but Leopard has been programmed to ignore them, perhaps because they would not display correctly.)

Shavian: Apple Symbols now has this in addition to Deseret.

No keyboard layout has been provided for Georgian, Shavian, or Deseret.

Reflecting the new Russian and Polish OS localizations, the number of fonts which include Cyrillic and the Latin characters needed for Polish has been significantly increased, and includes Marker Felt and Hoefler text among others.

Scripts included in Unicode 5.0 but for which users will still have to download fonts from other sources are N'ko, Phoenician, Balinese, Phags-Pa, Sumero-Akkadian Cuneiform, Buginese, Glagolitic, Coptic, Tifinagh, Syloti Nagri, Old Persian, Kharoshthi, New Tai Lue, Limbu, Tai Le, Linear B, Cypriot, Ugaritic, Osmanya, Tagalog, Hanunoo, Buhid, Tagbanwa, Old Italic, Gothic, Syriac, Thaana, Sinhala, Myanmar, Ethiopic, Ogham, Runic, Khmer, Mongolian, Bengali, Oriya, Telugu, Kannada, Malayam, Lao.

Here is some info on script support in Windows, which does include a number of those still missing from OS X.

Fixing Leopard's Latvian Keyboard

In the Apple forums some users have reported that Leopard's Latvian keyboard layout has a non-functioning ' deadkey for making the special characters which that language requires. It was OK in Tiger. For a replacement, try downloading and installing LatvianT.keylayout from my iDisk.

OS X 10.5 Leopard: New Keyboards and IM's

After installing Leopard, I found the following totally new keyboards: Tibetan (3 options), Jawi, Kazakh, and Uighur. There is no Kurdish layout, although this language is mentioned as being supported in Apple's Leopard "new features" page.

Other new keyboards which add options to what was already available in Tiger are: Traditional Chinese Zhuyin, Vietnamese Unikey (4 options), Arabic PC, Russian PC, Persian QWERTY, Sami PC, Norwegian Sami PC, and Swedish Sami PC . Traditional Chinese Pinyin is reportedly a totally new version of what went by the same name in 10.4.

Here is the total list for Leopard (an asterix indicates multiple options): Arabic*, Azeri, Armenian*, Belgian, Brazilian, British, Bulgarian*, Byelorussian, Canadian French, Cherokee*, Chinese (simplified and traditional)*, Croatian, Czech*, Danish, Dari, Devanagari*, Dutch, English, Estonian, Faroese, Finnish*, French*, German, Greek (regular and polytonic), Gujarati*, Gurmurkhi (Punjabi)*, Hawaiian, Hebrew*, Hungarian, Icelandic, Inuktitut*, Irish*, Italian*, Japanese*, Jawi, Kazakh, Korean*, Latvian, Lithuanian, Macedonian, Maori, Nepali, Norwegian*, Pashto, Persian*, Polish*, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian*, Sami*, Serbian*, Slovak, Slovenian, Spanish*, Swedish*, Swiss (French and German), Tamil*, Thai*, Tibetan*, Turkish*, Uighur, Ukrainian, Uzbek, Vietnamese*, and Welsh. Plus Character Palette, Japanese Kana Palette, Keyboard Viewer, Dvorak*, US Extended, and Unicode Hex.

Typing Linear B

Linear B was used to write an early form of Greek called Mycenaean. Although there is a keyboard for this script on my iDisk, the layout is arbitrary and not of much practical use. Thanks to Alessandro Vatri there is now a much more professional version, based on phonetic input, available from this page:

http://geocities.com/ale_vatri/

Fonts that cover Linear B include Aegean, ALPHABETUM Unicode, Code2001, MPH 2B Damase, and Penuturesu.

OS X Leopard Adds 3 Localizations and 15 Keyboard Layouts

OS X 10.5 Leopard was made available for preorder today, and Apple also published its tech specs and new features.

Tech Specs

Features

These indicate that 3 new localizations -- Russian, Polish, and Portuguese (Portugal) -- have been added to the previous 15. The full list is now English, Japanese, French, German, Spanish, Italian, Dutch, Swedish, Danish, Norwegian, Finnish, Traditional Chinese, SimplifiedChinese, Korean, Brazilian Portuguese, Portuguese (Portugal), Russian, Polish.

New languages mentioned as supported via keyboards/fonts are Tibetan, Kazakh, Uyghur, Kurdish, and Jawi (Malay in Arabic script).

New spell checkers are Russian and Danish.

Dictionary.app now includes Japanese (with a translation facility) in addition to English.

Here is a list of the language-related items from Apple's page describing Leopard's features.

A Hebrew Font Puzzle

Someone in the Apple forums reported that when using Safari to view certain web sites, all accented Latin characters were being replaced by Hebrew. Normally the culprit for such behavior should be a non-Unicode Hebrew font with the same name as that required by the web page code, which was Arial in this case. But it seemed that no such font could be found anywhere on the machine.

It turns out that the old Windows font Web Hebrew AD, with the filename wehad.ttf, is in fact just such an animal, replacing accented Latin by Hebrew according to the Win-1255 encoding. When examined with a font editor, you can see that its internal name is actually Arial, so that Safari can't tell the difference. Mystery solved.

iPhone Input Keyboard Gets Accented Latin

iPhone firmware update 1.1.1 of Sept. 27, 2007 adds the capability to make accented Latin characters to the iPhone keyboard. If you press and hold a letter, a pop-up menu will appear where you can choose an accented or other variation.

Oddly this update fails to duplicate the capabilities provided recently in the iPod Touch for localizing the user interface, predictive typing other than English, and for switching among various layouts or input in Japanese.

iPod Touch Language Capabilities

While the new iPod Touch strongly resembles the current iPhone (minus the phone), its language capabilities seem considerably greater. The tech specs indicate the user interface is localized in English, French, German, Japanese, Dutch, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Danish, Finnish, Norwegian, Swedish, Korean, Simplified Chinese, Traditional Chinese, Russian, and Polish. Keyboard input (only English in the iPhone) adds French, German, Japanese, Dutch, Italian, Spanish, Danish, Finnish, Norwegian, Swedish, Polish, and Portuguese. Dictionaries for predictive typing are available for English, UK English, French, and German.

To get accented characters, you hold down the key of the base letter.

Whether any additional languages are supported for web browsing and song info display is not known yet.

The upgraded standard iPods have no additions to their language support, described here, despite many requests for Hebrew, Arabic, Thai, etc.

Input Japanese on the iPhone

An earlier article mentioned a virtual keyboard that can be used for inputting some European languages plus Greek and Russian on the iPhone, whose built-in keyboard is English only. Now there is one for Japanese. To use it, point your iPhone or other browser to this page:

http://n.h7a.org/iphone/mail/

Another Arabic Keyboard Layout

I already have two Windows Arabic keyboard layouts on my iDisk, but it seems they may not be exactly right, so I have now put up another one which should match that provided with Windows Vista, seenhere (use Opera if it doesn't display right in your current browser):

The new layout is named WinVArabic101.keylayout and can be downloaded directly here:

http://idisk.mac.com/thgewecke-Public/WinVArabic101.keylayout

Let me know if you have any problems with it.

iLife '08 Adds New Localizations, iWork '08 Still Limited to 8

The updated version of iLife, issued August 7, includes new Russian and Polish localizations for all its components -- iPhoto, iWeb, iDVD, iMovie, and GarageBand. These are in addition to the usual 15 that have been customary for OS X and most of its apps.

Strangely, the updated iWork (Pages, Numbers, Keynote), issued the same date, continues to have only a truncated set of 8 localizations -- Dutch, English, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Spanish, and Simplified Chinese.

Reading and Writing Georgian

Georgian was made part of Unicode over 10 years ago. Though OS X has never included fonts or keyboards for this script, some have been available via downloading from the internet to enable a basic level of support. Thanks to Reno Siradze there is now a much more advanced and refined set of tools for Georgian, which you can get here:

Georgian Language Kit 1.0

For more good Georgian fonts, try BPG-InfoTech

Note that it is customary in Georgian headings, ads, captions, and titles to use a special capitalized version of the normal unicameral alphabet (called the Didi style of Mkhedruli or the Mtavruli style of Mkhedruli). Inputting this style requires switching to a special font, although some fonts like those from BPG put this type style in the 10A0 range in place of what is supposed to be there.

Note Added Later: OS X 10.5 Leopard does include one font with Georgian, namely Arial Unicode.

Where to Get Hardware Keyboards in Other Languages

If the physical keyboard on your Mac does not have the layout/language you want, here is place that sells Apple international keyboards:

Laptops

USB

iPhone: How to Send Email in Other Languages

No doubt Apple will eventually update the iPhone OS to included keyboards that enable input beyond the current ASCII English. But pending that it's possible, with a skillful combination of javascript vitual keyboards and the html "mailto" function, to create online keyboards that let you send email from the iPhone in a variety of languages. For an example, see this app

Virtual Keyboards

which can do French, German, Italian, Spanish, Russian, Czech, Greek, Brazilian, and Swedish.

iPhone Language Features Limited in First Version

I don't have an iPhone, but reports from users confirm that the OS in the device released June 29 has language capabilities that fall short of those in OS X Tiger. The user interface and keyboard input are English only. Text display in the browser (presumably the same as in email and other apps) includes W. European, E. European, Greek, Russian, Chinese, Japanese, and Korean. But no font is provided for Vietnamese, Arabic, Hebrew, Hindi, Thai, or Tamil, all of which are part of the full Tiger OS, or Tibetan, rumored to be added in Leopard. This particular iPhone is, of course, intended only for the US market.

A photo of a language test page can be seen here.

Multilingual iCal

If you would like to have the months and days of the week in another language in the calendars of iCal, go to System Preferences/International/Formats and change the Region to the language of your choice. Check the Show All Regions box to add more languages if you want. When iCal restarts the names should be changed. What might surprise you is that this can be done even in languages for which OS X has no localization, e.g. Arabic. Display will not be correct, however, for languages where you do not have an appropriate font installed.

Browser Language Test

Since the new Windows Safari beta has a number of bugs related to non-ascii text, and there also remain many questions about what the Safari used in the iPhone will be able to display, I have posted a simple web page that contains short samples of the scripts which often cause problems here.

http://homepage.mac.com/thgewecke/ltp.html

At the bottom of this page there is a graphic of what should be seen at the top, so users can easily compare the two and see what may not be displaying right.

Tiger should display everything correctly except Tibetan (unless you have installed the special font from XenotypeTech). Leopard comes with a Tibetan font and should also display that sample in proper fashion.

Some Tiger Versions Have Russian Localization

Russian is not listed in the Tiger tech specs as an available localization, and neither my retail PPC install nor updates to 10.4.9 have it. But I recently got an Intel iMac with 10.4.7, and this does in fact include Russian as an option for menus and dialogues. I would assume all versions of Leopard should have this.